An eEdition of The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey

Portrait of the Singer

According to his own testimony, Halil Bajgorić (hereafter HB) was thirty-nine years old when Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s native assistant Nikola Vujnović interviewed him and the research team recorded several of his epic songs on June 12-13, 1935. (1) In his relatively remote village of Dabrica, at the far end of the Stolac district that was Vujnović’s home territory as well, HB worked primarily at various kinds of farm labor, specializing in the rearing and sale of livestock, including oxen, horses, sheep, and goats. Dabrica may have been far removed from more populated regions, accessible only by paths for horses and foot traffic, HB explains, but it provided excellent support for the raising of livestock by virtue of its multiple “living waters” (žive vode) or springs. Clearly, the singer took genuine pride in his place and in his everyday profession.

From the beginning of his interview, however, he also described himself as a practicing guslar, a singer of tales, and the facts bear him out. Although still short of middle age, very unusual for a guslar of any accomplishment, HB could boast a repertoire of no fewer than thirty songs, as enumerated below from the singer’s own account. (2) Within that list, those actually collected by the Parry-Lord-Vujnović team are identified with the archival numbers assigned to them within the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature at Harvard University, with italic codes marking sung performances and Roman codes marking those written down from dictation. Performances collected during Lord’s follow-up trip in 1950-51 are preceded by the letter L. (3)

It should be emphasized that these are HB’s own “working titles", furnished in response to Vujnović’s request for a listing of his repertoire, and that they reflect the singer’s particular perspective on his performances. That is, many of them are one-sentence descriptions of the core action of the epic, couched in either the past tense (“His sister freed Bajagić Alija from captivity in Karlovo”) or – what amounts to the same thing within the epic register used for the performance itself – the historical present tense (“Hrnjičić Omer frees his father from Lenger”). Relatively few of the titles identify the song as the kind of finite, warehousable items we print in anthologies; rather they customarily betoken a series of actions, a living panoply of narrative activity. Indeed, that is very much the case with the performance to which this volume is devoted: the singer HB describes what we are calling The Wedding of Mustajbey’s Son Bećirbey as “Baturić ban kidnaps Mustajbey’s son’s fiancée, and Djerdjelez Alija defends her", focusing not on a discrete, indexable label but rather on what actually happens in the story. Generally speaking, we can deduce that he conceives of epic songs more as dynamic processes than as static products.

And how did HB learn how to tap into such processes? One clue is the fact that throughout the repertoire and interview he repeatedly attributes all of his songs except one to his father, Mujo Bajgorić. Of course, singers’ attributions are notoriously unstable (how many twenty-first-century citizens remember who told them each entry in their personal repertoire of jokes?), but HB ascribed only “Marko Kraljević and Nina of Koštun” to a certain Ilija Bradurić from Bijenje in Bosnia. Pressed by Vujnović to explain why he didn’t learn from other guslari as well, HB replies that he stayed home until age fourteen, at which point he joined the army and traveled more widely; in short, he simply wasn’t exposed to an array of models.(9) The remoteness of Dabrica may also have been a factor in the relative narrowness of his training, but the apparent paucity of models and sources is offset by the loyal son’s claim that his father was an extremely well-respected (if, as was common enough, unpaid) practitioner of the craft they shared:

Interestingly, HB also cites the social prestige accorded a guslar by the larger community at various gatherings, a distinction the young boy clearly prized and wanted to earn for himself:

Although HB was certified as illiterate (nepismen) by the Parry-Lord-Vujnović team, a printed songbook did play a small role in the acquisition of his repertoire. Presumably through the agency of some person who read aloud to him, he seems to have accessed this published record of Christian (Serbian) songs for at least two entries in his avowed repertoire:

The guslar’s comments on his sources are instructive both in themselves and for the light they shed on how he conceives of the transmission of epic songs. Like many bards in this and other traditions who know about the existence of writing-reading technology without actively using it themselves, HB had a special respect for the world of literacy and what he believed – on faith alone – could be managed via its foreign technology. That belief emerges in his attempt to explain how Ilija Bradurić’s version of “Marko Kraljević and Nina of Koštun” was superior to his father’s:

HB seems willing to cede authority to the written word, and formulates an emic or ethnic notion of aesthetics on the basis of a technology that remains outside his personal experience.(14) However we construe his motivation (explanations might include the unintentional influence of the research team and their background, an endemic cultural deferral to the mysterious written word, or other reasons), two evaluative concepts emerge from his brief observations: the notions of well organized composition and of precision in the enumeration of details. Clearly, HB places value on internal structure and fullness of exposition.

Such insights into the singer’s thinking are attributable not only to Parry’s behind-the-scenes prodding, the outlines of which are ascertainable in his field notes entitled “Ćor Huso",(15) but also to Vujnović’s consummate skill and unique authority in interviewing. Because he straddled the worlds of oral epic tradition and Western scholarship – being a guslar himself as well as having personal access to the arts of literacy – Vujnović could frame his questions to suit both his employers’ concerns and the world view of the singers who were both his interview subjects and his colleagues.(16) Not incidentally, Vujnović’s truly unique position also allowed him to broach potentially uncomfortable queries for the sake of learning more about the peculiar dynamism of the singer’s method, as when he pursued HB on the disparities between his version of “Kraljević Marko and Nina of Koštun” and the songbook version the singer claimed as his ultimate source:

What this exchange establishes is not simply an interesting correspondence between an epic locus and the real-life landscape of the Stolac area as the link exists in HB’s mind,(17) but also the acknowledged difference in register or “way of speaking” in a performed epic song as opposed to everyday conversation. When Vujnović inquires why guslari use a ten-syllable verse complete with an apparently pejorative adjective (kleti, “accursed” or “damned”) to refer to this nearby mountain peak, named for one of the greatest of Serbian heroes, HB’s answer is “because it has to be said that way” (“Pa eto mora da se rekne”). He is explaining that the decasyllable verse is the appropriate “word” for this purpose in the epic lexicon; although people say (but do not sing) the more straightforward sentence “There he was under Markovac," using the same sentence within the performance arena of oral epic composition would amount to employing the wrong expressive code.(18) Given what the South Slavic singers say about the indivisibility and idiomatic meaning of the sound-bytes they call “words” (reči) – nothing smaller than a phrase can qualify as a speech-act, and whole scenes and even songs are called single “words” – HB is merely thinking inside the expressive system of oral epic performance.(19) His distinction here, mirrored elsewhere in conversations with other guslari, shows him to be an excellent linguist, more sophisticated in his awareness of the innate diversity between epic and everyday registers of speech than many highly trained Western scholars.

The singer’s own internal sense of his tradition emerges again when Vujnović confronts HB about a marked structural disparity between his two performances of “Kraljević Marko and Nina of Koštun”. From our external, etic perspective the difference amounts to the guslar’s having omitted the typical scenes of Arming the Hero and Caparisoning the Horse from the second performance, producing the kind of variability that Lord studied and exemplified so thoroughly in The Singer of Tales (1960). HB, however, chooses to explain the omission (if in fact we can call it that, given the dynamic pliability of epic performance and the implied aspects of a song-story that may or may not reach explicit expression in any given performance) in another, more colorful way:

Convinced that his interviewer must be right about the disparity and its seriousness, and showing allegiance at least for the moment to what is finally a textual measurement outside his personal experience, HB ascribes to a nondescript fever what is presented to him as a flaw. In fact, we may well inquire whether Vujnović’s question becomes relevant only after a living series of performances within an ongoing, emergent tradition is reduced to a museum-like exhibition of artifacts, only after language is frozen into text. The singer did not notice the alleged discrepancy himself, no more than we track minute incongruencies in our own idiomatic performance pursuits, across recurrent instances of story-telling, joke-telling, or personal narratives. What is finally most interesting about this small discussion is that Vujnović is pursuing an irrelevant line of inquiry, identifying a distinction from one world that resists translation to the other. HB, persuaded that he has committed an error exposed by the research team, pleads a fever; we would do well to understand that the malady is not his.

Another illustration of the “cognitive dissonance” between the world views of the singer and the research team appears as a result of Vujnović’s pursuit of an issue that has long troubled scholars involved with traditional oral epics: to what extent does the tale reflect true events, characters, and situations? How does the story square with reality? After probing HB on the actual geographical location of Prilip (a town closely associated with the hero Prince Marko), the practical likelihood of making such a lengthy journey in a short period, and other “fact versus fiction” aspects of the story told in his “Marko Kraljević and Nina of Koštun", Vujnović poses a series of questions that finally lie outside the singer’s concerns:

For the singer, historical truth and factual accuracy are part of the same world as textual discrepancies. While these may be viable and important concepts for the research team, they are not a part of the way he himself construes his craft.

HB and Vujnović then turn to an exchange about the comparative ease of full-speed singing in performance versus the much slower, stop-and-start process of dictating for written transcription. Interestingly, the conversation again reveals a cognitive mismatch, as HB concentrates more on the advantages of using his own gusle (as opposed to someone else’s) than on the suggested comparison between modes of composition. If he were forced to use an unfamiliar instrument, says HB, he “could more easily narrate [dictate] a song than sing it to the gusle.” As for evaluating one mode versus the other in any absolute sense, however, that kind of contrast seems beyond the informant’s perspective. In general, those of the Stolac singers whose recordings, transcribed performances, and interviews I have examined show a preference for sung over dictated delivery.(20)

Toward the end of the interview, after more discussion about local history and an embedded performance of “Nina of Koštun and Vidak the Shepherd",(21) HB offers a penetrating insight into the genealogy of epic singers and the powerful concept of a master guslar:

Crucially, this story itself is traditional.(22) Singers in this region and in others told a cognate tale, with systematic variation in such details as the master-bard’s name (Isak, Huso, Ćor Huso, Hasan Ćoso, and so on), his parentage, his native village, his repertoire (always large and made up of “the best songs", but differing in actual contents from one account to another), and his trademark accomplishments. In some versions this Guslar – I use the uppercase letter to distinguish him from his lesser, real-life colleagues – performed so well that males and females were allowed to mix at a Moslem wedding (dissolving a religious prohibition), while in other cases the Guslar registered a surprising and remarkable victory in an epic-singing competition (against all expectation because he was dressed so humbly and acted so modestly) or sang all night without a break to rest his voice (a physical impossibility) or boasted a repertoire of 300 songs (many times the maximum ever verified). It is thus no accident that HB’s version of this paragon – Hasan Ćoso – lived 120 years, or that he could leap twelve paces less than a year before his death, or that he traveled “everywhere in the world”. Correspondingly, it is an essential part of the story that the singer describing the Guslar should never have actually met him personally; the master-bard is always a generation or two removed, or a couple of villages away, or currently traveling somewhere else.

Indeed, everything about this idealized figure is legendary, the stuff of tradition, and quite necessarily so. By creating a legendary genealogy traceable to the Guslar, each guslar certifies his own personal position in the informal guild; he identifies himself as descended – through their shared songs – from the best of singers, someone whose abilities and achievements cannot be called into question, precisely because he exists in another frame of reference, beyond the confines of any single guslar’s time and place. In effect, the Guslar is a way for individual singers to conceptualize the tradition at large, to tag what we conceive of as an abstraction – “the South Slavic oral epic tradition” – by idiomatic referral to an anthropomorphic figure. HB’s Hasan Ćoso fits this mold, not merely as a “historical” progenitor but as a bardic credential and a coded appeal to tradition. Although HB explicitly disavows any real kinship with this legend (as the convention demands), his identity as a guslar depends centrally on an epic-singing pedigree that begins with the Guslar.

Footnotes

1. This brief biography, which concentrates on HB’s identity as a guslar, is based on the interview of the singer conducted by Nikola Vujnović on June 13, 1935 (MPC no. 6698; see Kay 1995: 231). All translations of excerpts from that interview, intentionally rendered in a free and colloquial idiom, are my own.
2. The oral-dictated text of the repertoire is MPC no. 6694; see Kay 1995: 231.
3. This system mirrors that employed by Lord in the SCHS volumes. For performance data on all such songs and interviews from the field trips of the 1930’s, see Kay 1995. Note that there is some instability in the given titles of songs; for example, NV transcribed the first song as concerning “Nina” rather than the conventional “Mina” of Koštun (mirroring, incidentally, a common nasal exchange, [m]>[n], in the singing register). Since the repertoire was dictated and written down rather than acoustically recorded, this variance cannot be checked. Preferring to report what the guslar (on best evidence) actually said rather than “correct” the received text, I have maintained what NV wrote in all cases, even when that spelling is contradicted in other sources. Compare the section on Nikola Vujnović’s Resinging, elsewhere in this volume, which documents the traditional and systematic variation between the acoustic record of the song’s performance and NV’s remaking during his transcription. In translating the titles I have rendered tenses literally, since I take the historical present tense to be a feature of the singing register rather than of the everyday speech of the interview.
4. During the conversation Nikola cites this place-name as Ledjane, a typical kind of minor variation; see further note 3 above.
5. One expects the name Vrčić, but NV has transcribed without the initial diacritic (probably lapsus calami).
6. As happens many times with proper names and especially with the trickster hero Tale, the inflections are not grammatical and the sense must be construed otherwise.
7. The orthography makes this place-name unclear.
8. NV omits the numeral in his accounting.
9. In this respect HB’s learning process may have been somewhat unusual in comparison to that of other singers recorded by Parry, Lord, and Vujnović. See further Lord 2000: 13-29.
10. Here as commonly enough elsewhere within the epic register–and this “title” is in fact the opening line to the song listed in HB’s repertoire as “Miloš Obilić in prison in Ledjene”–HB misinflects a verb form, perhaps under the influence of the common poetic figure of in-line rhyme (sila with pobratima). For more instances of this kind of lapsus linguae, see the Performance and Commentary elsewhere in this eEdition. Note that Parry poses a question about which song is meant in the next sentence. Although he intervenes only rarely in the actual interviewing, the observations made in his field notes (see “Ćor Huso", Parry 1933-35) demonstrate how closely he was involved in the interviewing process.
11. This may well have been a selection from Karadžić 1841-62. For a convenient English translation of many of the most famous songs from this collection, see Holton and Mihailovich 1997.
12. On the history and nature of Moslem as distinguished from Christian songs, see Foley 1991: chs. 3-4, 2002: 204-13.
13. Note that HB does not respond to this question but continues with his efforts to describe the superiority of Bradurić’s version.
14. Compare the South Slavic oral epic tradition’s broad-based fascination with epistolary communication (see further Foley 1991: 20-21). Letters (knjige) are rehearsed fondly and customarily at considerable length, with vocalization at both the sending and receiving ends of the process. In effect, especially in the act of performance by a guslar, these letters are less written texts than long-distance, face-to-face exchanges. Another telling comparison is Homer’s attitude toward written signs, which he does not himself employ but construes as a subspecies of “sign” (sêma), the same term that designates funeral markers, omens, Odysseus’ scar, the olive-tree bed, and other items and events in which unique symbolic meaning is covertly but idiomatically embedded (see Foley 1999a: espec. 1-5, 13-34).
15. See note 10. Parry’s thoughts on the South Slavic oral epic tradition per se, as opposed to primarily comparative remarks that bear in some way on the Homeric poems, are documented in the full, unpublished version of the field notes deposited in the Parry Collection at Harvard University.
16. It is this same double identity, and the “bilingualism” that went along with it, that fostered Vujnović’s tradition-based modifications in HB’s song even as the colleague/interviewer later transcribed it from the acoustic recording. See further Nikola Vujnović’s Resinging elsewhere in this eEdition.
17. For an interesting perspective on the relationship between the mythic landscape of traditional oral epic and the historical and topical facts of that geography, see the discussion of “epic archaeology” in the Tulu Siri Epic (Honko 1998: 322-36) and the analysis of Apache place-names in Basso 1988.
18. Nor does the negative connotation of kleti compromise the expressive integrity of the verse; for a full explanation and a comparison to Homeric phraseology, see Foley 1991: 243-52.
19. For further evidence of what the South Slavic singers intend by the term “word”, see Foley 2002: 11-21. Similarly, later in this same conversation HB discriminates between two forms of a place-name: “in a song one sings Zlatozoglav, and now we say Zoglav”(emphasis added). The four-syllable version can occupy the first colon or serve as the line-ending element in a six-syllable phrase that would fill the second colon (this latter usage on the basis of its metrical extent and the traditional rules underlying South Slavic deseterac phraseology; see further Foley 1990: 171-200).
20. That is, they seem not to reflect the attitude toward oral dictation described by Lord (e.g., 2000: 124-29) in reference to Avdo Medjedović and other guslari. The Stolac singers' spoken performances show no regular gain in length and complexity over the sung performances, and in fact the reverse is often the case.
21. In what amounts to what Dell Hymes calls a “breakthrough into performance” (1981), HB responds to Vujnović’s request for another song that mentions HB’s home village of Dabrica with a brief, 104-line performance of “Nina of Koštun and Vidak the Shepherd.” This is an example of how HB, and other guslari as well, can readily code-switch from the everyday register (appropriate to the interview) to the epic register and back again, as the speech-act requires.
22. See further Foley 1998, 1999a: 49-63.

• Preface
• Pronunciation Key
• Introduction
• Portrait of the Singer
• Synopsis of the Story
• Performance by Halil Bajgorić
• Performance-based Commentary
• Nikola Vujnović’s Resinging
• Apparatus Fabulosus
• The Role of Music
• Performatives and Poetics
• Bibliography
•  
• Text Translation (pdf, 216 KB)
• Play Audio (mp3, 70.4MB)